More in depth information about the shooter.
Both of his parents were mental health care workers. Once was a Democrat and one a Libertarian.
He had an Associates Degree in Engineering Science and worked as a Dietary Aide at a nursing home.
He was a member of a gun club that has a 200 yard rifle range.
I looked up the Nursing Home. It is pretty understaffed (aren’t they all). As an attorney who has litigated against understaffed NH’s and spoken with staff, it can be very stressful job, certainly when you’re expected to be in two places at once due to understaffing and dealing with angry residents/family because of that - and you don’t make much money doing it. Anyways, this is solely a nugget of info about his job, don’t extrapolate this into anything more as it was not my intention. He may have loved it there. It just happened to be something I deal with.
People are digging through the social media activity of the firefighter who apparently died acting to protect his family, and some of it is really ugly. I feel terrible for his family, I hope the kids are smart enough to stay away from social media.
Even more so now. (Too soon?)
It’s easy enough to look up on X. He posted a fair amount of far right racist stuff and was an extreme MAGA. Like he loved Trump but thought that most of the rest of the party were RINOs. One of his posts (which was deleted) mocked a tragedy where people were killed caused him to resign his job as a fire captain.
Why is anyone concerned about the firefighter’s background? His reasons for being there, and his background in general, aren’t likely to be much different from any of the other attendees.
The right thing to do is for Trump to be there at the funeral.
~Max
And Biden perhaps.
Or Harris, which the dead guy would apparently hate, were he not dead.
There have been a lot of attempts to explain away the bizarre and disturbing fact that an armed person was able to get on an accessible rooftop, with a clear line of sight to the rally podium, less than 150 yards from that podium. And that he was there for enough minutes for rally-goers to try to alert law enforcement. And that nothing happened until after he’d shot up the rally.
None of these excuses have been at all convincing:
Crooks was wearing a grey T-shirt. Nothing about his appearance could have suggested to the snipers that he was law enforcement.
And what kind of operation is it where actual LE personnel are up on roofs and their partners don’t know that they’re there? How does that make sense?
How is this an excuse? They ignored the building giving a shooter the best chance of hitting the protectee…why?
The snipers who ended up silencing Crooks were already set up facing the building on which Crooks climbed, shimmied over to the edge, and took aim. And the snipers could see none of what was in plain sight of rally-goers and which had to have taken two or three minutes, at least—again, on the rooftop closest to the podium?
Here’s the photo:
As noted, we DO know that the suspect was exposed to existing sniper positions. They were pre-set-up–one many lying facing the suspect’s perch and the standing officer with his weapon’s tripod set so that he, too, was facing the suspect.
As for the time, “seconds” was almost certainly “minutes” of notice to LE that someone was on that roof:
More on the LE snipers already being setup facing the suspect’s perch (previously linked by @Magiver):
This is long enough so I’ll put refutations of other offered excuses in another post. Bottom line: attempts to pass off what happened at the rally as ‘normal’ or ‘understandable’ are failing. It’s not ‘conspiracy thinking’ to want to see evidence instead of excuses.
We need to see an open and transparent investigation.
I don’t know if Biden should be there. He had nothing to do with it. Head of Secret Service maybe. Would the family even want Biden there?
~Max
It would have been nice if Trump, shaken but with no injury other than a cut on his ear, could have at least offered to visit the dead man’s family. I’m seeing no evidence that he did so.
Of course we may hear eventually that he did. I guess we’ll have to wait to see if the family of Mr. Comperatore decide to speak about it.
If I’m choosing the weapon rather than having it issued to me, I’m going with a calibre larger than .223 or 5.56. That’s my only qualification with the AR-15 here.
My guess would be that the Secret Service only have 4-5 people assigned to Trump at any given moment. You probably need at least 2 near Trump, 1 ready as a getaway driver, and another as a counter-sniper sniper. That doesn’t leave much to watch the greater picture.
You’re largely reliant on local law enforcement who - despite being necessary - are probably more of a threat to the person you’re protecting than anyone in the crowd since they know the positioning, they’re trained with weapons, and no one would second guess anything they do. The last thing you might want is to put local law enforcement in a good sniping position on the roof.
It’s not an excuse. Just a reality of having your eye on a 7-35x magnification scope. Like looking through a straw - unless it’s pointed at the target, you won’t see it - nor will you see people waving and pointing at the shooter. I’m specifically talking about the seconds before the shooting
Probably could not see due to the angle of the roof - but that’s unknown right now. Until the shooter got high enough/exposed himself, he would be unseen by people on the other side of the building. Even the witnesses on the opposite side of the building, who had longer deeper angles, and pointed the shooter out to police. The police were up close to the building and could not see (due to the sharp angle) - so they climbed up to verify. It’s just geometry.
It’s not clear if those snipers were the ones who took the shot. They were multiple sniper teams, those two guys being one team. Unless I missed it which is possible, let me know why you think that sniper team is the team that took the shot and killed the shooter? I would think so, but I’ve never seen that confirmed anywhere.
Lastly, witness seeing guy with gun is likely going to be communicated as guy with possible gun (because police never saw it/confirmed with enough time). It’s a tough call to shoot a kid if you don’t know he has a gun/haven’t been told explicitly to shoot him.
I think this is a failure to execute a plan to secure a high risk building prior to/during event; and a failure to communicate clearly what is happening in real-time. Mostly the first, I’d think, depending on how long it took for officer to see gun/fall/radio that info in.
We know they had scopes set on the roof, we don’t know whether they had a line of sight before the first shot was fired. Secret Service has said they were in a small perimeter around the President which did not extend to the shooter’s position so I’m thinking they didn’t have a line of sight. The shooter was positioned on the slope of the roof facing away from the stage and presumably sniper positions. There may have been all of one or two seconds between him popping over the edge of the roof and shots fired.
Also, the people who saw the shooter set up were not rally-goers, per say. They were hanging out on a property next to the event, across the street on the far end of the field, and they walked out onto the field during the event. So they had come up behind the shooter. But they were still hundreds of feet away from the stage, the crowd, and the police on the ground they were shouting at.
~Max
This statement seems to me to be unlikely to be seconded by actual Secret Service people.
But I’m not pretending to be an expert on the topic.
(Basically you’re saying that former Presidents can NEVER expect to be protected, because you can’t put anyone but SS on rooftops, and there aren’t enough SS to put on rooftops.)
I’d say that the expectation of security that a person would imagine is in place is probably wildly lower than you’d find in reality due to practical issues, budgets, and the fact that your average assassin-wannabe is some crazy who struggles to live an everyday life, let alone having the capacity to organize a reasonable assassination attempt.
Here is what the most sane person in politics has to say about the matter.
If there was a rooftop within 150 yards of the protectee, and snipers had no clear view of that roof, then that roof needs to have a guard posted. That this didn’t happen cannot be SOP. If it is, then heads should roll.
I agree that all the variables–what can be seen from where, etc.–must be nailed down and made clear to all (even if only via a FOI request).
I don’t think this confirmed in any of the news reports. But it’s suggestive that every news report, so far as I can see, a) identifies those particular snipers as being the ones on the particular roof marked on maps as being the location of the suspect-shooting snipers, or b) actually shows video of those particular snipers being the ones on that particular perch. You can see this in the video that Magiver linked upthread. Here’s a link to that post:
I agree that this detail (whether or not the photo shows “the” snipers) needs to be confirmed.
There were one or two seconds between the shots fired at the podium area and the shots fired at the suspect.
You are basically claiming that in those one or two seconds, the snipers fully re-positioned their bodies and weapon-tripods so as to face the suspect.
Even if that were possible, I believe there is or will be photographic evidence that the snipers were facing the suspect long before those first shots hit the podium area.